In an oft-quoted sermon by 17th-century poet John Donne titled Devotions upon emergency occasions and several steps in my sickness—Medication XVII, written in 1624, Donne writes:
No man is an island entire of itself; every man
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main;
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as any manner of thy friends or of thine
own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind.
And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.
